The CDC's 7 Word Ban Is an Attempt to Erase Transgender People from Existence

By Gabrielle Bellot

December 18, 2017

"Erase this essential language, and, slowly, you also erase us."

“Don’t tell anyone what you are,” my mother said to me over the phone, some weeks after coming out as transgender to my parents. I was walking outside an apartment complex in Tallahassee, mottled brown leaves crunching under my slippers; she was in the Commonwealth of Dominica, the island where I had grown up. “The — the t-word.”

I remember how my mother sounded: slow, tremulous, weak; her voice seemed limp, untenanted, like a dress removed from its hanger. Something had slipped and sunk in her when I came out; to keep herself upright, she tried to push me down, tried to get me to suppress myself. She ordered me to write only under my male name, threatened me with suicide and disownment when I changed that name legally.

She wanted me to hide myself in the absence of the very word that exists to describe me. She couldn’t say the word in full; to do so would have been to confront me, in full, as what I was, to dirty her mouth in the way the nuns had taught her and her twelve sisters in a convent in Grenada one must never do. By simplifying her language, she was simplifying me, erasing a part of me. In Dominica, it was more common than in America to expect a child to obey their parents, and knowing I was hurting my mother hurt me, even as I knew, too, that I had to live my truth.

A few years after that phone call, now living in a snowy, blustery Brooklyn in the last month of 2017, I found myself facing another painful erasure, another attempt at parent-like linguistic control — this one from the American government. The President’s administration, I read, had ordered that the Centers for Disease Control stop using the term “transgender” in documents pertaining to 2019 budget reports, along with six other words: vulnerable, entitlement, fetus, science-based, evidence-based, and diversity. America’s primary public health institute had been advised to quietly erase transgender people, as it is much more difficult to talk about us without using this most basic of terminology.

Language shapes our map of the world. If "transgender" ceases to exist as a term in official government documents, we, too, begin to vanish. It is easier for a cisgender administrator, who we might hope to have as an ally, to forget about our concerns when the government mandates that we be forgotten ourselves. (Alarmingly, The Hill reports that the administration has issued similar guidances for banned words to agencies beyond the CDC, including the State Department.) That a 2015 poll indicated more Americans had claimed to have seen a ghost than a person they knew was trans betokens how invisible we already largely are; how little, legally, we have to lose.

Erase this essential language, and, slowly, you also erase us.

Control language, and you begin to control a narrative, begin to control our foundations, begin, even, to control our flitting thoughts and dreams.

Language has long been a target for dictators, a tool first for identification, then elimination. In the lead-up to the 1937 Parsley Massacre, General Rafael Trujillo — who was influenced by, amongst other illustrious sources, Adolf Hitler — ordered the expulsion and execution of Haitians on the Dominican Republic’s border. One notorious method for identifying Haitians was to ask people to pronounce perejil — "parsley" — a word that those who had grown up in Haiti tended to pronounce with a distinct difference. The 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests are simplified or erased altogether in Chinese textbooks; with this erasure, the protests, which ironically were partly against suppression of speech, become forgettable blips on the radar for generations born after them.

Control language, and you begin to control a narrative, begin to control our foundations, begin, even, to control our flitting thoughts and dreams. This is partly how "Black Lives Matter activist" shifts, via an FBI document, into "Black Identity Extremist." For many people, however, these arguments, which braid the present-day administration to other terrifying regimes, appear excessive. You’re magnifying something tiny, this counter-argument goes, and trying to make it seem like it’s really that big.

Yet dictators often start with the small things, the things we can brush aside, if not miss altogether. The deftest move at an almost gentle, geologic pace, which, as with the slow cracking of real continents, goes almost undetected until something horrific begins, with Galilean certainty, to move beneath us. When prominent White House officials spout romanticized, pro-Confederacy rhetoric, it may not, immediately, seem connected to the still ongoing phenomenon of school districts banning books about blackness that make white parents uncomfortable — even largely anodyne texts like To Kill a Mockingbird. Yet both phenomena are symptomatic of the same desire to stop talking about uncomfortable racial truths and to, instead, slowly erase them.

When White House officials soften the horrors of slavery under code words like "heritage," they are corroborating underlying narratives already in certain American history books, whereby "slave" is changed into "worker" and the slave trade into "immigration." How bad could slavery be, a child raised on such books might wonder, if they were just "workers?"

These conservatives may seem merely comedic in their fatuous, ahistorical, anti-scientific traditionalism; in reality, they are following the playbook of contemporary fascists, which has now taken even more explicit form in a formal guidance to ban specific words. A wide contingent of Americans ignores the existence of something unless it seems overt; racism or sexism do not exist, they scoff, unless someone is caught on camera being lynched or raped — and, even then, they frequently doubt the incident’s veracity. Denialism leads to normalization, normalization, to fascism.

The Trump administration, which has done little with regards to actualizing its stated political goals, is looking for quick, simple "wins" against seemingly easy targets for its base, like transgender people. The proposed military ban, and now this, engender bursts of support from Trump’s often virulently transphobic base — a base that, with shameless hypocrisy, portrays itself as being aligned with a party in favor of free speech and opposed to censorship.

When an administration repeatedly attempts to ban us under the guise of protecting "normalcy" and "safety," it is trying to shift language: to associate "transgender" with "abnormality" and "danger." Make no mistake: this is an attempt at erasure — one subtler, yet potentially more severe than the military ban.

I find myself thinking, again, of my mother — when she forbade me, once more, from using “the t-word” at our home in Dominica, some weeks after the phone call to her, as I was getting ready to drive down to a book launch for a local author I knew at a popular hotel. It was the last time I would set foot in the island I had grown up in; a place I loved but where I knew I could never live as an openly queer woman, because people like me had zero legal protections, and next to no chances at a normal, happy life. I still hadn’t come out to more than a few people; my name was still a male appellation that felt like an ugly mask.

On this final trip, I had brought a rollerball vial of perfume with me from a boutique in Florida, which I had gone to — in terror and exhilaration — presenting as a woman. I pretended it was a men’s cologne when my mother asked, with quiet fury, what I was doing with it. Before the event, I gently dabbed the rollerball around my nipples, in the crook of my arms. I wanted the scent to follow me, a shadow of the girl in me singing her quiet orphic cabaret songs, yet I also wanted it so subtle that no one would actually notice it. I was, like many in the closet, full of contradictions. I wanted to sing a song everyone heard and that no one could hear.

I passed her before I stepped outside. She had been smiling, but now her face wrinkled into a frown. The hint of fragrance on me reminded her of what she had been trying to forget. I left before she cried or yelled, and, as I drove down the winding mountain road, dark but for the lights of our family jeep, I tried to convince myself that nothing was wrong. But I knew I was lying to myself even then. The subtle perfume was a reminder: you have to stop letting others erase you. At the event, I laughed as I talked with friends, but I kept my distance all the same, hoping they wouldn’t smell the perfume, and hating the performance of a male gender I was putting on.

I wonder why these little memories return to me, and then I remember: it all starts with the hints, the little things that aren’t so little. Trump aimed large with his military ban and received widespread condemnation; now, he is narrowing his target, and, unfortunately, that will likely be more effective. Though his administration is receiving flak for its censorship of the CDC and other agencies, it’s all too easy to let news like this slide after a few days. Unlike the military ban, it seems less in-your-face. But that is precisely why it is dangerous and unacceptable. They cannot have this one. We need to combat this attempt at silencing and erasure by being loud and visible; by showing this administration that we are here to stay, and it can never truly make us forgotten, no matter how Trump and his reactionary contingent may try.

Gabrielle Bellot is a staff writer for Literary Hub. She is the recipient of the 2016 Poynter Fellowship from Yale and also holds a Legacy Fellowship from Florida State University. Bellot holds both an MFA and a PhD in Fiction from FSU, and currently teaches classes at Catapult.